Press play on Barry Manilow's "Could It Be Magic" and the first voice you hear is not Barry Manilow. It's a piano, alone, playing a piece of Chopin almost straight off the page. The pop song hasn't started yet. When it does start, it swells into the big disco-era record you remember, and then, at the very end, the Chopin comes back and closes the door behind it. The prelude opens the track and the prelude shuts it. Manilow is everything in between.
This is one of those songs you've heard a hundred times, in a supermarket, on a radio someone else was holding, and the odds are good you never once clocked the dead composer standing in the doorway. He's been there the whole time, in plain hearing, top and tail.
The piece is Prelude No. 20, a funeral march that lasts under a minute
The music framing the song is Chopin's Prelude in C minor, Op. 28 No. 20, one of his set of twenty-four Preludes. It's short, slow and heavy, a little funeral march of a thing. A pianist can play the whole of it in under a minute and still leave the room quiet afterward.
Manilow built "Could It Be Magic" out of that prelude back in 1971. He'd been at the piano playing Chopin, and the pop song grew out of the music under his hands. So this isn't a song tipping its hat to the classical world from a safe distance. It's a pop record descended from one specific Chopin prelude, written by a man who was playing the source when the idea arrived.
Listen to the start and the finish, not the middle
Most pop songs that borrow from classical hide it deep in the harmony, where you'd have to go looking. The 1975 record does the opposite and puts the evidence at the front door. It quotes eight bars of Prelude No. 20 at the open, Chopin's melody note for note, written in the 1830s, before a single disco chord lands. Then the song does its thing. And when it's done, it returns to the prelude to finish, so the last bars you hear are the same nineteenth-century music as the first.
The pop song is the filling. Chopin is the bread.
Strip the disco away and you're left with the prelude itself. Here it is played straight, no drums, no swell, no Barry, just the piano line Manilow had under his hands when the song arrived. It's the same eight bars that open and close the hit, sitting alone the way Chopin wrote them. Once you've heard it bare, you can't un-hear it inside the record.
Two names on the credits, doing different jobs
The credits are worth getting right, because it's easy to flatten this into "Barry Manilow covered Chopin," which is not what happened. The words are by Adrienne Anderson. The music is credited to Manilow, derived from Chopin. He didn't cover a Chopin piece, and he didn't co-write one with a man two centuries dead. He composed a pop song on top of an existing prelude, the way a builder puts a new house on old foundations. The foundation is Chopin's. The house is Manilow's. Both names belong on the deed, doing different jobs.
And Chopin gets the credit, not a cheque. In a lot of these pop-borrows-classical stories, a long-dead composer's estate turns up holding out a hand for a slice of the royalties. This one doesn't work that way. Chopin died in 1849, so the prelude has been in the public domain for a very long time. Nobody owns it and nobody is owed a percentage. The acknowledgment is openly made, on the printings where it appears, that the music comes from Chopin, and that has never been a secret.
It came out first as a cowbell-and-dance-beat flop
The version everyone owns, the dramatic ballad with the prelude bolted on top, is the second attempt. The first one bombed, and almost nobody has heard it.
In October 1971 the song first reached the public not as a Manilow single but under a made-up band name, "Featherbed featuring Barry Manilow," produced by Tony Orlando for Bell Records. Orlando took it nowhere near a Chopin prelude. He gave it a dance beat and cowbells, closer to his own "Knock Three Times" than to anything funereal, and put it out as uptempo bubblegum pop. No piano alone at the front. No nineteenth-century melody opening the door. Just a peppy little single that went nowhere on the charts and vanished.
The chord changes were Chopin's from the start, the same bones under both versions. But the prelude itself, those eight bars standing alone top and tail, wasn't there yet. Manilow had pictured something with a slow classical build, a "Hey Jude" that grew; Orlando went the other way and made it bounce. It took until 1975, when Manilow re-recorded it for Arista as a slow dramatic ballad and put the Chopin out front where you couldn't miss it, for the song to land. That version reached number six in the US, his second top-ten hit after "Mandy." Leaning into the classical is the thing that worked. The flop hid the prelude. The hit handed it the microphone.
Go hear the prelude as Chopin, with no disco swell
Once you know the bookends are Chopin, the next move is the fun one. Go listen to Chopin's piano writing on its own, with no disco swell coming to lift it, and hear the register Manilow was sitting in before the pop song arrived. Our Chopin collection below runs through his nocturnes, his études, his ballades and his preludes, the same body of work the song reached into. Hear it as Chopin, then go back to the radio version.
The next time "Could It Be Magic" comes on and the piano opens it up before Barry sings a word, you'll know those bars aren't the intro. They're the oldest part of the song, written before recorded music existed, and they're the reason the second version stuck when the first one didn't.
